Is the sharp drop in India's coronavirus cases as dramatic and curious as some believe?Is the pandemic firmly in retreat in a country where many early modellers had predicted millions of deaths due to Covid-19?In October, I had written extensively on why the pandemic appeared to be slowing down in India. Cases had hit a record peak in the middle of September - there were more than a million active cases. After that daily deaths and caseloads began declining despite consistent testing and some short and fierce spikes of infections in cities like Delhi.The situation has markedly improved since.By the middle of last week, India was barely counting an average of 10,000 Covid cases every day. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from the disease slid to below 100. More than half of India's states were not reporting any Covid deaths. On Tuesday, Delhi, once an infection hotspot, did not record a single Covid death, for the first time in 10 months.So far, India has recorded more than 10 million infections - the second-highest in the world after the US. There have been over 150,000 reported deaths from the disease. The number of deaths per million people stands at 112, much lower than what has been reported in Europe or North America. It is also clear that the decline in cases is not because of lower testing.Most pandemics typically rise and fall in a bell-shaped curve. India has been no exception. Also, it has seen a high proportion of cases and deaths of people above the age of 65 living in densely packed cities, hewing to infection trends around the world."There's nothing unusual about infections dropping in India. There's no miracle here," says Dr Shahid Jameel, a leading virologist.Experts say there's no dearth of possible causes - explained below - for the relatively low severity of the disease and its toll.